The Gaza Building, a former PLO hospital, is a symbol of Palestinian survival in the refugee camp of Sabra (Beirut) North of Shatila camp.

Across the building’s 11 floors, 11 year-old Arafat spends his time spying at his neighbour, destroying falling parts of the structure and training his dog. Together with his friend Muhammad they think of ways to explore the forbidden underground, where ‘there is only sex, drug and death’.

Meanwhile everyone in the building is talking about the potentially fake story of a man that has just fallen off the 4th floor of the building, the cause being unknown.

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A MAN FELL was born from chance. On my fourth journey to Lebanon, with the intent of discovering new aspects of the neighbourhood of Shatila, I was faced with unexpected changes in the socio-dynamics surrounding the family Alhaddad (Song of All Ends). After several days looking for new inspiration, I realised that many safe conditions were no longer available to continue my work there, above all: a large increment in drug production and use and the government raids against all Syrians without papers to be removed from the country. 

On my first week there I met with Yasser Al Ali, a barber with a shop at the entrance of Sabra. He kindly proposed me to visit a place unknown to me until then: the Gaza Building, where him and his 3 children lived over the past 15 years. We entered its dark staircases one night as he said to me: ‘welcome to hell, Gio’.

From that moment I investigated my possibilities, finally learning some basic Arabic expressions and interacting with the building’s inhabitants from all ages over a period of 25 days. My immediate interest became to portray the dynamics and energy of what can be seen as a monolith of passive resistance of the Palestinian condition.

Palestinians in Lebanon include the Palestinian refugees who fled to Lebanon during the 1948 Palestine War, their descendants, the Palestinian militias which resided in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, and Palestinian nationals who moved to Lebanon from countries experiencing conflict, such as Syria. There are roughly 3,000 registered Palestinians and their descendants who hold no identification cards, including refugees of the 1967 Naksa. Many Palestinians in Lebanon are refugees and their descendants, who have been barred from naturalisation, retaining stateless refugee status.

In 2017, a census by the Lebanese government counted 174,000 Palestinians in Lebanon. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) counted 475,075 registered Palestine refugees as of 31 December 2019. Most Palestinians in Lebanon do not have Lebanese citizenship and therefore do not have Lebanese identity cards, which would entitle them to government services, such as health and education. They are also legally barred from owning property or entering a list of desirable occupations. Employment requires a government-issued work permit, and, according to the New York Times in 2011, although "Lebanon hands out and renews hundreds of thousands of work permits every year to people from Africa, Asia and other Arab countries... until now, only a handful have been given" to Palestinians.

Israeli Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh accused Lebanon of practicing apartheid against Palestinian Arabs who have lived in Lebanon as stateless refugees since 1948.

I decided to insist on an important symbolic element in the aesthetics of the film: the building’s windows. Windows in this space become an unavoidable source of reflection towards an ‘other world’ from which the inhabitants are excluded.

Yet they are the only source of lights to escape a life otherwise defined by darkness.

As the inside and the outside of the camp are two distinct and separated worlds, the frame of those windows becomes a screen onto which the unreachable is projected, a higher point of view where only imagination can run off.

It was imperative for me that no element of the outside world is ever clearly visible to us, nor is the building itself, as seen by the other side of the camps.

As for my previous works, perhaps even more so in A MAN FELL, I let my instinct and the surroundings define my filmmaking process.

As mentioned above, it was once again by pure chance that I was able to access such a rich and complex environment. After 5 days visiting the different apartments, where many were initially reluctant of getting involved in the project, Yasser and I decided to develop a film based on the seemingly unimportant stories of the building, through the eyes of the young Arafat. 

Reducing my usual equipment enabled us to be portable between the building’s 11 floors, where we set to capture immediate moments as well as more prepared scenes with the kids.

I soon discovered that there is drama to spare within Gaza’s walls, and many stories where initially followed and then abandoned on pure moral grounds.

As my introduction to the building was christened by the news of a man falling from the 4th floor just a few instants prior (WhatsApp messages were pouring on everyone’s phone on my first arrival), I thought that that story should be the conductive segment that reunites all others. 

We shot for a total of 16 days, plus a final 2 days for sound. Several scenes were re-shot multiple times, mostly when credibility from the main 2 boys was at stake (as imaginable those were exciting and at times boring working days for the young ones). Everyone collaborated on the project, particularly Yasser’s 2 daughters that took care of catering and chaperoning the younger kids, and Yasser himself, who co-produced and co-wrote the film with me, guiding me relentlessly through the maze that is Gaza Building.